PF Collection Archives

Years ago I borrowed this book called Street Art: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981 and the lending roommate disappeared before I had a chance to return it. Lucky me! The book is amazing and there are tons of fantastic posters in here. Some advertise shows, some have political messages, and others are just pieces of odd/beautiful/shocking street art. The book was organized by Peter Belsito, Bob Davis, and Marian Kester around an exhibition of 500 posters that took place at Valencia Tool and Die during the Western Front Punk Festival in 1980. Valencia Tool and Die was a San Francisco Mission District punk club in an old hardware store. I don't know too much about it except for seeing its name on posters in this book and hearing old SF punx reminisce about it. Sounded like fun though.

The introduction to the book is 15 theses on poster art. This is #1: The Poster is a thoroughly modern thing. One of those eminently practical stars in what the late Dr. McLuhan called "Gutenberg's galaxy." Compared to the newspaper, book, magazine or the mighty miracle of the imprinted check, the poster may appear to be one of the lesser lights in the print universe, yet it remains as enduring as any of these and, indeed, if form can truly be said to follow function, perhaps the most consistently bright.

Below are 8 pages from the book along with the names of the bands and designers and any information I can find on them. There is so much great stuff in this book, I'm going to have to post at least one more installment. Enjoy!

After Dark was a mainstream entertainment magazine that was pretty gay back in the 70's. It was run and written by smart New York homos who mostly covered theater, dance and movie stars they thought were fabulous and/or sexy. Basically they covered whoever the hell they wanted in much the same vein as Index or Butt. They unabashedly featured photography of naked dancers (and a notorious nude of a certain California governor) alongside entertainment coverage. After Dark was owned and run by Dance Magazine, a company both myself and Ms. Keough worked for– so we got our hands on this old book, Pose, from 1973, that collects some of After Dark's lovely black and white photography.

Back in ye olden days of my San Francisco life, I was totally in awe of these older punks who ran around town making zines, playing shows, riding bikes, drawing on stuff, and generally having a fantastic time. A bunch of them lived down near Toxic Gulf (a ratty old pier/park on the bay at the end of 24th Street where I spent much of my formative years) in a house with the address 666 Illinois. I thought that was rad. I cut school in the afternoons to have adventures of my own and sometimes I'd ride by bike down there to sit in the Muni graveyard. I always wondered what they were up to as I biked by. Greta Snider, editor of Mudflap and maker of films, was one of my favorites. She now teaches in the film program at SF State and her films have screened at places like the MOMA and Sundance. I recently got my scanner back from Mr. Mcginnis and spent the morning looking at Greta's back issues. The stories about drunk biking, Capp St. hoes, outdoor sex, and gardening/train hopping/swimming/bike trick how-tos are enthusiastic, helpful and hilarious but my favorites are the maps and diagrams. See a few examples after the jump...

Marian Kester's essay on the punk poster and it's success in the bay area in particular talks about a history of poster making in San Francisco from '60s concert posters to political flyers as well as the relationship between punk and technology. This DEVO quote sums up the latter quite well: "The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be. With synthesizers you can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brain waves, blood flow." The last line of her essay is particularly amusing to me, an SF native: "So—elsewhere, money talks, nobody walks—and the weather stinks." I love it. Leave it to a bay area person to insult the weather in the rest of the country. Hee. But she does have a point, especially back in 1981 when she wrote it: Most cities are car cities and there just isn't enough foot traffic to justify flyering. Plus it's just too damn cold in the winter to walk around wheat-pasting.

Here, in installment two of my post on Street Art: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981, I will show you 9 more posters and give you any information I can find on their makers. See installment one for more history and posters!

Anyone who's worked a temp job or, hell, anyone who's worked anywhere can relate to the stories in Temp Slave! The zine was started by Jeff Kelly in 1993 as a one-off response to being strung along as a temp at an insurance company with a promise for future employment only to be canned out of the blue. He handed it out to other employees as he was leaving the company. He got such a good response that he continued publishing. Each issue includes crushing boredom, rage against bosses who use you and then toss you out, hilarious ways to scam the company, cartoons, survival tales, the many many ways to get fired, and more. Jeff Kelly no longer publishes Temp Slave! but you can buy the Temp Slave! compilation book through Garrett County Press.

This excerpt from Heidi Pollock's great article chronicling the day in the life of a temp from issue #5 is a perfect introduction. It reminds me of every mind-numbing spirit-destroying data entry temp job I've ever had:

"In the morning you always feel a complete and total separation from your fellow workers. At no other time during the day do you feel like such an outsider...Even the briefest thought that you might have something in common with the permanent secretaries makes you queasy and short of breath. This arrogance wears off as the day continues.

In any case, from 11 or so onward, until lunch, you experience a supreme and all-consuming boredom. It is so boring that you want to kill yourself. You want to stand on the top of your desk and scream and jump up and down and tear your hair and tear off your clothes. Sometimes the urge to simply scream out random obscenities is so powerful, it makes you worry about your sanity. You begin to feel the power of desire."

During Butt Magazine's early years they had a companion zine, a sisterly counterpart, called Kutt. It was started by their friend Jessica Gysel. She put out a few issues of Kutt and then seemed to disappear, only to resurface a few years later with the fantastic Girls Like Us magazine. Ultimately, Girls Like Us is the better mag--more fully realized, existing on its own rather than as a version of Butt, etc. Regardless, the issues of Kutt are still totally good, if you can find them... I had been looking for ages before I finally found a single copy of issue #3 at St. Marks Books.

Someone ran up to Ms. Keough in the street and said, "Here, you'll love this..." and handed her this amazing 1965 issue of the Swiss design magazine, Graphis (It became an American magazine in 1986). I promptly stole it from her.

This issue is an amazing time capsule of design - when conceptual thought was king, creating 'art' was a major motivation in commercial work and illustration was prevalent. Even in black and white, the work depicted is striking and colorful. Wow.

Jack Magazine (The Endless Hayride) was an irreverent art/lifestyle mag out of Sante Fe, New Mexico edited by Rick Maslow and Art Directed by Thomas Grignon that I bought at Tower Records in New York back in the 90's. It may very well have been created on a MAC, but it has a very crisp, pre-computer look to it. All the ads are for cigarettes and booze which is what this mag is all about - a 90's cocktail, vintage aesthetic, evoking a 50's magazine, with an arty, thrift store bent. Jack is even more endearing because it's not from New York, LA or London. Yes, there IS a rest of the world. More pics after the jump.

A few years back I lamented a lack of collected issues of JANK on the internet or otherwise. I was just looking through some boxes of zines, trying to organize and protect (potential interns I'm looking at you here) all these piles of oddly-sized and delicate items when I came across a couple of copies of JANK and thought I'd do my part by posting them for you.

JANK was a house zine by Jeff Jank (above left) and Janelle Hessig (of Tales of Blarg! fame, above right). It was one sheet of letter paper folded in half the long way and I always picked it up at the comics shop in Berkeley. Among the many highlights were reviews of house guests (one of my favorite pastimes), hilariously profiled past US presidents, and goofy around town kind of adventure comics.